Well thanks for the try. I have looked all through out the cfg files and nothing seems wrong...dumped several of them into my dev programs and no errors. I will just continue searching for an answer. I knew there were a couple of linux guru's on the site and was hoping for a quick solution..lol. never seems to work out that way.

Thing is I had it running with no problems. I did a bunch of updates and installed a backup utility called Acronis. Now everything is eff'd up, luckily this was not a live server...but it has moved from a testing environment to a live setup and now I need to get mysql backup and running...I do not want to reinstall the OS because the server is being used for a file server and intranet based web services.